By Angela Singer
What does the Bible have to say about justice? That was the topic of a recent Victoria University lecture series by Dr Jim Skillen, president of a Washington-based think-tank called the Centre for Public Justice.
Jim, who was visiting Wellington for the first time, drew on his 27 years of work with the Centre and his many books, including A Covenant to Keep: Meditations on the Biblical Theme of Justice, to speak on the ways that Christians as caretakers of God’s world must take an active role in doing justice.
He comes from an evangelical background (“evangelicalism is my roots”) and says that because evangelicals don’t want to see the Christian Church politicised, the Church can be split on the subject of doing justice.
“I’m quite sympathetic to those who do not want to see the Church as a means to a political end”, Jim says. “But if you take the full Biblical meaning of evangelism, of being witnesses to the Good News, then it seems to me [that] in bearing testimony to the Lordship of Christ, we need to be conscious that in all of our lives we’ve got these responsibilities of service. Service is not just something you do with words when you talk to someone about Christ.
“If Christians are to be full people of God in all areas of life, then Christian leaders are needed in the political realm, in arts, medicine and sciences. We need leaders who will say, ‘what from the Biblical tradition can we bring to bear on this?’ We ought to be mining the depth of Christian perspective on life and have this as the contribution we make, rather than saying ‘our religion is private’ or ‘evangelism doesn’t have to do this’.”
Jim says that “evangelicalism has been shaped by the liberal fundamentalist controversy of the 20th century, where fundamentalists fled from what was a kind of politicising and social activising of the Church, which in part I think they legitimately criticised, but then they are in their own mode of politicising now, in many ways. I think there has to be a much fuller way of talking about a person’s service to God and all life than happens typically by evangelicals”.
With so many demands on our time, Jim says it is difficult to take devotional work into the world. “Members of churches come for worship and service on a Sunday, not to have a knapsack put on their back filled with duties to do; that burden of moral duty creates tension because serious church people don’t want to just write it off. Churches have to do the best they can in providing all the support they can, to help members answer the Biblical call to do justice in public life”.
Commenting on this subject as part of his response to the US Chicago Declaration II “A Call for Evangelical Renewal”, Jim says, “every individual does not bear all of these responsibilities in the same way. And particular congregations should not try to bear all of them”.
“In each case, the call to do justice takes on a distinctive character. The call does not go out to people in a general, undifferentiated mass. When we ask how we should heed God, our response must arise from within the actual responsibilities we bear as parents, teachers, employers, citizens, consumers, scientists, artists, and so forth.”
Dr Jim Skillen has degrees from Duke University, the Free University of Amsterdam, Westminster Theological Seminary, and Wheaton College. He has lectured widely around the world in theology and politics. His books and writings are available through The Centre for Social Justice website at www.cpjustice.org